WELLINGTON, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- The New Zealand government is to provide Thai authorities with a New Zealand-developed victim identification software package to help identify victims of the Boxing Day tsunami, Foreign Minister Phil Goff announced Monday.

    "A request for this assistance was made last week when I visited the Wat Yang Yao mortuary in Phuket. After seeing the aftermath of the tsunami first hand, and seeing the tremendous work forensic staff are doing in Thailand, I agreed New Zealand would help," Goff said in a government press release.

    "The scale of the disaster has been beyond what anyone involvedin forensic DNA recovery work had ever envisaged," he said.

    Thailand has recently set up a national DNA laboratory with theassistance of New Zealand's Environmental Science and Research Ltd(ESR), he added.

    Goff said ESR was now customizing disaster victim identification software to integrate into the laboratory's existing DNA sample management system. ESR staff are currently en-route to Thailand to install the software, train local staff and help the laboratory consolidate their victim identification processes so they work most effectively with the database.

    Currently, each country with victims is responsible for providing ante-mortem DNA samples to the International Victim Identification Co-ordination Center in Phuket. There are literallythousands of these samples that will be recorded using the software and then matched to post-mortem DNA samples from the victims.

    This is a very important process which will help bring closure to many families around the world who lost loved ones as a result of the tsunami, Goff said.

    NZAID, the government's aid agency, is meeting the 250,000 NZ dollars (about 175,000 US dollars) cost of the ESR package, which is in additional to the 10 million NZ dollars (about 7 million US dollars) New Zealand has already committed to emergency relief efforts.

    Goff said the New Zealand government was currently considering an enhanced package of tsunami relief that would probably be announced within days. Enditem